Zip enables secure, high performance remote working for its workforce

As Boutros explains, VPNs were simply not practical in this case. “The cost for the VPN licenses alone ruled this option out immediately,” says Boutros. “But there were performance considerations too: we would have had a situation where our 500 Sydney-based employees would have been sharing a single 50 meg link. It would also have been a significant drain on IT resources, as we would have needed to whitelist all employee devices to get them on the network.”

In a hurry to get the remote working capability up and running, Boutros decided to take a closer look at the company’s existing investments in Netskope’s Intelligent Security Service Edge.

Today, the NPA solution lies at the heart of Zip’s ongoing remote working capability and is fully integrated with Zip’s Netskope alliance partners, including Crowdstrike, Mimecast, and Sumologic, for a robust security infrastructure.

The usability of NPA is another benefit. Boutros reports that no tickets have been raised for support issues with NPA. “Most people don’t even know the NPA is there,” he says, “they just turn on their workstations and they have access to what they need—no more, no less. This is helped by an incredible partnership with Netskope. Its team goes the extra mile to help us try out new things and get the most out of its systems.”

From a security perspective, Zip benefits by being able to link the NPA’s backend API to its analytics systems. “Thanks to the flexibility of NPA, we can stream alerts into our analytics dashboard and run behavioral analysis, which provides a real boost to our ability to detect threats.”